Getting old bypass
What is definite is that head transplantation—or physique transplant, as some desire to name it—is a topic of rising, if speculative, curiosity in longevity circles, the type inhabited by biohackers, techno-anarchists, and others on the fringes of biotechnology and the startup scene and who kind probably the most devoted cadre of utmost life-extensionists.
Many proponents of longer life spans will admit issues don’t look good. Anti-aging drugs to this point hasn’t achieved any breakthroughs. Actually, as analysis advances into the molecular particulars, the issue of dying solely appears to be like increasingly difficult. As we age, our billions of cells regularly succumb to the irreversible results of entropy. Fixing which will by no means be potential.
By comparability, placing your head on a younger physique appears to be like comparatively simple—a solution to bypass getting older in a single stroke, no less than so long as your mind holds out. The thought was strongly endorsed in a technical highway map put ahead this yr by the Longevity Biotech Fellowship, a gaggle espousing radical life extension, which rated “physique substitute” as the most affordable, quickest pathway to “remedy getting older.”
Will head transplants work? In a crude method, they have already got. Within the early Nineteen Seventies, the American neurosurgeon Robert White carried out a “cephalic change,” reducing off the top of a monkey, inserting it on the physique of one other, and stitching collectively their circulatory methods. Reviews counsel the top remained aware, and in a position to see, for just a few days earlier than it died.
Almost certainly, a human head transplant would even be deadly. However even in case you lived, you’d be a thoughts atop a paralyzed physique, since exchanging heads means severing the spinal wire.
But head-swapping proponents can level to believable options for that, too—quite a few which seem within the BrainBridge video. In Europe, as an example, some paralyzed individuals have walked once more after docs bridged their spinal accidents with electronics. Different scientists in China are finding out progress components to regrow nerves.
Joined on the neck
As stunning because the video is, BrainBridge is in some methods overly typical in its considering. If you wish to maintain your mind going, why should it’s on a human physique? You may as an alternative maintain the top alive on a heart-lung machine—with an Elon Musk neural implant to let it surf the web, for so long as it lives. Or think about how docs hoping to resolve the organ scarcity have began placing hearts and kidneys from genetically engineered pigs into sufferers. If you happen to don’t thoughts having a tail and 4 legs, perhaps your head may very well be positioned onto a pig’s physique.
Let’s take it a step additional. Why does the physique “donor” need to be useless in any respect? Anatomically, it’s potential to have two heads. There are conjoined twins who share one physique. In case your partner have been recognized with a deadly most cancers, you’d absolutely welcome his or her head subsequent to yours, if it allowed their thoughts to stay on. In any case, the idea of a “residing donor” is broadly accepted in transplant drugs already, and married {couples} are sometimes mentioned to be joined on the hip. Why not on the neck, too?